For White-Serving Institutions That Have Considered Anti-Racism When Diversity Was Not Enough

• In Event: Resilient Pathways: Toward Political Theories of Action for Achieving Educational Equity

Abstract

The purpose of this scholarly paper is to interrogate the ways diversity logics and their ideological import into the performative/non-performative commitments White-serving colleges and universities made in the wake of George Floyd undergird the elevation of institutional anti-racism as a fraught diversity regime. As such, we argue that the move away from diversity discourses in exchange for anti-racist rhetoric while failing to contend with the inherent limitations of the diversity frames continues to undermine any serious remediation of systemic and structural racism broadly and anti-Blackness more specifically. Furthermore, and in the context of the contemporary sociopolitical realities, we contend that institutional anti-racism (i.e., policies, practices, programs, and initiatives) is largely operationalized as a racial symbol (Bell, 1992; Tichavakunda, 2021) with abstract value. Drawing on Patton et al.’s (2019) assertion of a “two-steps-forward-one-step-back cycle” of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives’, institutional antiracism has similarly served as an aesthetic technology (Unangst, 2022) rather than the structural intervention postsecondary leaders espoused it to be. That is, through employing narrative strategies and public relations tools that bolster the perception of organizational change, the words of anti-racism have been prioritized rather than the work of dismantling barriers designed to exclude, marginalize, and minoritize non-white institutional stakeholders and community members. Such approaches, therefore, reinforce pervasive onto-epistemologies of anti-Blackness while simultaneously preserving structures of white supremacy in postsecondary institutions in an irredeemable fashion. That irredeemability, then, serves as further motivation to guide the non-performative gestures of institutional anti-racism toward temporary institutionalization and the violence of minority absorption.

Authors

• Charles H.F. Davis, University of Michigan

• Angie Kim, University of Michigan

• Amber Williams, University of Michigan

• Laura Lee Smith, University of Michigan